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An anonymous reader writes: An enterprising hacker took on a project to rebuild a broken Gameboy using emulation software, a Raspberry Pi, and a few other easily-obtainable parts. The result: success! The hacker has posted a detailed walkthrough explaining all of the challenges and how they were solved. "Using a Dremel, I cut out a most of the battery compartment as well as some posts that on the case for the LCD that would no longer be needed. Doing so, the Pi sits flush with the back of the DMG case. ... The screen was the first challenge. The screen runs off 12V out of the box which wouldn't work with the USB battery pack. The USB battery pack is rated at 5V, 1000mAH so the goal was go modify the screen to allow it to run at 5V. ... I finally got it to work by removing the power converter chip as well as soldering a jumper between the + power in and the resister on the top right."

The point that he is a humorless old bastard? Yeah, we all got that point. There was nothing wrong with your original comment. Some people just hang here that are not really nerds.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. If anything, I'd expect nerds to be the ones more likely to care that the underlying tech was the authentic original, beyond its external appearance.

Or perhaps this is one of the differentiators between a "nerd" and a "geek".

Either way, whatever one thinks of this sort of thing, it isn't really a story. People have been shoving small-form factor PCs inside old computer cases for years now, leading to stupid headlines like "upgraded Commodore 64 runs 10,000 times fas

Considering he had real Gameboy already and probably real cartridges, I refuse to believe that downloading ROM dumps digitally identical to the same cartridges are piracy - regardless of what Nintendo's lawyers believe.

UMG argued, in part, that the copying was not covered by fair use because entire CDs were copied (instead of excerpts) and that the use was a commercial one (even though no fee was charged, it was supported by ad revenue).

This use would not be commercial. It's the difference between a Slingbox and Aereo. Aereo is a commercial provider. Slingbox is DIY.

And on top of that, I can't easily prove that I bought a ROM dumper on eBay/Craigslist (or borrowed one) and re-sold it once my collection was ripped. So I would hope the burden of proof that I didn't would be on them anyway.

Furthermore, piracy is not a legal or case law term - it's more of an ethical term. And ethically, it is not wrong.

The important question for me would be: can I plug in any of my Gameboy carts and expect it to play the game? That would actually be fairly trivial but nobody seems interested in something like that. It's just a Z80 and the whole schematic is published.

I bought a Zelda Gameboy Advance cart at a used game store just last night. The Gameboy Advance SP still rocks, esp. if you get a model 101 version. It's so perfectly balanced, and plays any Gameboy cart going all the way back to the earliest that I fail to understand why anybody would even bother 'emulating' it with new hardware.

William Strunk covered this in 1914. You're never supposed to put quotes around words like that, as it puts on airs to show the audience that you're using some vulgar slang, but we're all better than that.

Quotes are used when referencing a term. We call this "using quotes". If you otherwise "use quotes" around "things" in your "sen-tance", you look like a "huge jackass" like Dr. Evil.

... I fail to understand why anybody would even bother 'emulating' it with new hardware.

The simplest reason would be to avoid carrying more hardware. I love my SP but since it's a unitasker I usually leave it out of my bag. Other potential reasons include, but are not limited to, ROM hacks, developing a deeper understanding of the technology and simply overcoming the challenge of emulating something correctly.

But a GBA with a little "magic" cartdrige (I mean flash / linker) will allow more uses out of it, like carrying 20 games (with the option of them being legit, though Nintendo never liked that and always pretended ripping your cartridges is wrong), running your ROM hacks on real hardware and then miscellaneous homebrew programs and media readers.

That said on the GBA SP, I think the form factor is pretty great but that the lighting is just bad, modding one to improve the lighting would be interesting if that

Possibly so that they permanently install their entire library of GB/GBA/GBC games and not have to lug around the carts? Not to mention being able to also add all their Nintendo, Sega, N64, retro-PC, etc,etc,etc games on the same device? If you like the shell why not put some far more capable guts into it. I'll admit I haven't seen many folks who care about balance, but that's nothing a couple strategically placed weights can't add.

Yeah. Emulators for disc-based systems will often read original disks (although to be fair, they often do tend to work better with ISO's).For a GB hack, it would cool to see this with something like a USB/serial interface to the original cart slot.

Interesting, maybe. Practical? Not particularly. In the space of that ROM cart + reader you could fit most of a PC, including a flash card big enough to store every cartridge-based game ever released for any platform, though obviously you'd only install the games you've actually purchased...

That's a nice job. Of course, the only original part is the case. Coneniently, there's someone who sells a board with buttons designed to fit in a GameBoy case and bring out the buttons for emulation purposes.

If you 3D printed a new case, you would't need a Game Boy at all. I wonder if there's a decal set for that.

I still have all of my original games including the rarest of the lot! Tetris 1.0, Pokonyan and others. The most depressing thing about the Game Boy is that nobody really did anything that they could have with the Super Game Boy.